Keyboard layout
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The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the QWERTY layout
for the letter keys. During the period in which Sholes and his
colleagues were experimenting with this invention, other keyboard
arrangements were apparently tried, but these are poorly documented.
The tantalizing near-alphabetical sequence on the "home row" of the
QWERTY layout (d-f-g-h-j-k-l) suggests that a straightforward
alphabetical arrangement may have been the original starting point.
The QWERTY layout of keys has become the de facto standard for
English-language typewriter and computer keyboards. Other languages
written in the Latin alphabet may use variants of the QWERTY
layouts, such as the French AZERTY and German QWERTZ layouts.
The QWERTY layout is thought by some to be an inefficient one, since
it requires a touch-typist to move his or her fingers between rows
to type the most common letters. A popular story suggests that it
was used for early typewriters because it was inefficient; it slowed
a typist down so as to reduce the frequency of the typewriter's type
bars from wedging together and jamming the machine. |
A more likely explanation is that the QWERTY arrangement was
designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing by placing
commonly used combinations of letters farther away from each other
inside the machine. This allowed the user to actually type faster
without jamming. Unfortunately, no definitive explanation for the
QWERTY keyboard has been found, and typewriter aficionados continue
to debate the issue.
Interestingly, the word "typewriter" is one of the longest single
English words that can be typed on a single row (namely, the top
row) of a QWERTY keyboard ('protereotype' and 'rupturewort' are
longer). One plausible story behind the unusual layout is that it
was designed so that the salesmen could quickly type the word
“typewriter”, thereby impressing their prospective customers. It
seems unlikely however, that the engineers would have designed the
keyboard layout around a simple sales gimmick.
A number of radically different layouts, such as the Dvorak
keyboard, have been proposed to reduce the perceived inefficiencies
of QWERTY, but these have not been able to displace the QWERTY
layout; their proponents claim considerable advantages, but so far
inertia has prevented any mainstream adoption. The Blickensderfer
typewriter with its DHIATENSOR layout may have possibly been the
first attempt at optimizing the keyboard layout for efficiency
advantages.
Many old typewriters do not contain a separate key for the numeral
1, and some even older ones also lack the numeral zero. Typists
learned the habit of using the lowercase letter l for the digit 1,
and the uppercase O for the zero. Some still carry the habit of
using the letter l instead of the numeral 1 with them when typing on
a computer, sometimes leading to errors, especially when working
with numerical data.
Several words of the 'typewriter age' have survived into the
personal computer era. Examples include:
carbon copy – now in its abbreviated form "CC" designating copies of
email messages (with no carbon involved, at least not until
potential printouts);
cursor – a marker used to indicate where the next character will be
printed
carriage return (CR) – indicating an end of line and return to the
first column of text (and on some computer platforms, advancing to
the next line)
line feed (LF), aka 'newline' – standing for moving the cursor to
the next on-screen line of text in a word processor document (and on
the eventual printout's) of the document). |
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